By Katrin Redfern
News Blaze
"Cambodia is a democracy on paper but in reality a dictatorship. Our party activists are murdered because they fight for justice-life is still cheap in Cambodia."
A new American president, many Cambodians hope, might change all that. Sochua Mu, an opposition leader and founder of the women's movement in Cambodia, recently returned to the U.S., lobbying Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to take a firmer line on democracy and human rights in her long-suffering country. "I needed to see the people in the new administration to urge them to re-assess U.S. foreign policy," says Sochua in an interview with The Daily Beast.
"Cambodia is a democracy on paper but in reality a dictatorship. Our party activists are murdered because they fight for justice-life is still cheap in Cambodia. Human trafficking, drug trafficking, land grabbing, and forced evictions are all carried out under the nose of the government."
Sochua Mu's story is uniquely Cambodian. Forced to flee for her life at 18 in the early 1970s as the Vietnam War spilled over the border, she left behind her parents, who vanished, as did one-quarter of the country's population during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror. Sochua wound up in America, won a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley, and worked as a counselor and translator for the Cambodian refugees who began to trickle over. She eventually became a U.S. citizen.
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